If not now, when? Coffee’s path to a sustainable future

I think the sustainability for us, it's, uh, related to the classical three pillars of sustainability.

We will talk about the economic sustainability, social sustainability, and environmental sustainability.

In many moments, we are more worried about the environmental and the social aspects, but we need to know that the economic sustainability is very important also for the producers and for the other links of the chain as well.

So, uh, we need to find a way that our sector or, or our value chain can be sustainable socially and environmentally, but also getting money and looking for the prosperity of all the links of the chain, from the producers until the coffee shops and the retail, and also including here the baristas, the cuppers, the...

All the people that are involved in this industry.

Economic sustainability will be if we see the producer, uh, side, we are talking about the livelihood.

And also, a little bit more than that, we have been talking a lot about the living income, to get a fair living income, but the producers, they would like to, to have the prosperity as they, they say.

Uh, they would like to, to see the coffee plantations and the coffee production as a business for them, as it is a business for all of the other links of the chain.

So to be a business, they need to be prosperous.

Yeah.

And they need to have such level of profitability.

Why? Because then we will go to one of the aspects of the social sustainability, that is to engage the new generations.

If this is not a business, a plantation that cannot be profitable, the new generations, the youngers, they will not be happy to, to follow their parents' steps.

Yeah.

A- and so that links in, obviously, as you said, to social sustainability.

And what about environmental? What are the kind of issues there that coffee is responsible for?

We started to talk, I think around 12 and 15 years ago, we started to talk a lot about climate change.

And we, we thought at that moment that this was something to, to be planned and to be act very far away.

We, we talk about 2050 maybe-

Yeah

... we need to take care of that.

But this, it's becoming quite fast.

The climate change, it's here, it's now.

The highest temperatures are here since 2021.

We are facing a lot of very severe weather events in the, in the producing areas worldwide, and also the increase of the, the highest temperatures on these areas.